It was our last day in the Kenyan capital before heading south to Tanzania. After breakfast at the Methodist guesthouse where we were staying, I checked my e-mail and found a note from my dear friend in New York City, the Jesuit priest and author Jim Martin. He'd heard that I was traveling in Kenya and asked me, if time allowed, to please stop by the Jesuit Refugee Service where he lived in the 1990s. During his tenure in Nairobi, Jim opened a shop called the Mikono Centre at the Jesuit compound where refugee artisans sell their wares.Our agenda for the day was pretty full, but we decided to swing by the shop on our way to visit some new friends in Kibera, one of two enormous slums in the city not far from the Jesuit Refugee Service. While we were browsing at Mikono through racks of textiles and paintings depicting African scenes and spiritual tableaus -- I purchased a nativity set made entirely from banana leaves -- the shop clerk asked if we'd like to see some of the artists at work.
One of their most popular artists, she told us, was working on a carving in a building a few yards away. "His name is Agostino," the clerk said.Hearing that name felt like a thunderbolt had hit the ground. Agostino! Jim had mentioned his name to me with so much love. He'd written about Agostino in his wonderful book This Our Exile: A Spiritual Journey with the Refugees of East Africa. Jim had discovered Agostino, a refugee who had fled to Kenya from his native Mozambique, carving rosewood sculptures on a mat outside an office building in downtown Nairobi. Jim invited Agostino to sculpt at the Jesuit compound and sell his pieces at Mikono. He was one of the first artists to do a booming business and gather a following of patrons -- a man whose faith, as well as his artistry, had so inspired my friend the priest, and one of the center's great success stories. I bolted out the door toward the building where the clerk said Agostino was carving. As I turned the corner, there he was, bent over a piece of ebony wood propped up on a broad stump that served as his workbench.
He looked exactly as Jim had described him, a bear of a man with liquid eyes, soulful and with a quiet strength, like a living saint.When I introduced myself and told him I brought greetings from Jim, he beamed. "Please tell Father Jim that it's a good thing he started Mikono all those years ago," he said. "Now we have children and some of them are in school, and they're in school because of this." When Agostino said "this," he motioned to the piece he had just finished carving and was beginning to stain with a delicate, long-handled brush. It was the figure of a small black child pressing his face and hands into the palm of a giant man's hand. Even in its unfinished state, it was breathtaking. We asked Agostino when he thought he would complete the sculpture and told him we would like to buy it and take it home with us. He said he could finish it by that evening. We agreed on a price and told him how glad we were to meet him and how thrilled Jim would be that we had been able to see him.
As we turned to leave, I asked if the sculpture had a name. "Yes," Agostino said quietly. "I call it 'Hand of God.' "When we returned that night to collect the Hand of God, Agostino was gone and the sculpture was wrapped in paper and packed carefully in a bag for our travel the next morning. I don't recall how many days later we opened the package to take a better look at the piece, but when we did, we found an added surprise. On the bottom of the sculpture, next to where he'd signed his name and the date, Agostino had carved a Scripture reference from the 49th chapter of the book of Isaiah. We took out our Bible and looked it up. This is what it said: "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palm of my hands."
Link to the full article Why Jesus has great hands by CATHLEEN FALSANI
Photo is of Fr Jim Martin, S.J. in his early years (here)
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